Recovery houses offer addicts a chance, but heroin fights back

Colleen Watchorn, left, and Kathy Mackie hold up a quilt that Colleen's daughter made utiizing remnants of Stephen Watchorn's clothing. Stephen died of a heroin overdose in 2012.
(Photo by Kevin Hoffman/The Mercury)

They never met, but Jamie Fogle and Trevor Mackie both ended up in a recovery house, trying to transition back to a functioning life while fighting heroin addictions that became too much to handle without help.

They took the steps to get sober, but staying sober isn’t easy. Even in a recovery house, some people can’t resist addiction.

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Fogle, 21, of York, is still fighting it, living in a women’s recovery house in York.

Mackie couldn’t resist.

He went to the recovery house around Thanksgiving 2011 after he went through rehab.

He became the house president and got a good job — a requirement to live in the house. He was sober through Christmas.

In January, on his way to his parents’ Lower Pottsgrove home to pick up a car they got him so he could get to his job, he stopped in Reading and bought heroin.

When Mackie picked up the car, his mother didn’t know he had drugs on him. She told him to call when he got back to York, but he never did.

At the recovery house, he took the drugs and overdosed.

He was found dead Jan. 19, 2012, in the place where his family said he had started to come alive.

‘It takes time’

A recovery house can provide a necessary stop on the way to living a life free of drugs and alcohol, said David Dunkel, who has operated Sees The Day Inc., in York, since its doors opened in 1996.

Dunkel, who has 28 years of sobriety after fighting his heroin addiction, started with one house. Now he operates 14, each with between 6 and 13 residents.

Dunkel’s recovery houses aren’t licensed treatment facilities or halfway houses. No professional counseling is done on-site, and no medication is administered. Instead, residents support one another and follow strict house rules.

The recovery house is designed to provide a recovering addict or alcoholic with a safe, supportive place to live after detox and before going into the world on their own.

Residents must have a job and obey a curfew. They must attend house meetings and sobriety meetings. They must keep up with their rent. To someone who hasn’t been addicted, it might seem easy.

But for someone who depended on drugs to “feel normal,” Dunkel said, getting off drugs doesn’t feel normal.

“It takes time to change a habit, time to change a lifestyle,” Dunkel said. “Just learning how to live life without a drink or a drug” takes time, Dunkel said. “Making new friendships and just learning to have fun. Before, their fun was drink or drugs.”

For some, like Mackie, a recovery house is the step that comes after rehab.

For others, like Fogle, a stay in a recovery house is court-ordered.

And sometimes, the person has run out of resources, having burned bridges while feeding an addiction.

“By the time (addicts) get to us, their families are tired of them,” Dunkel said.

About 80 percent of residents who come to Sees The Day are from outside York County. Most are fighting an opiate addiction, like heroin.

“With that 18- to 25-year-old group, we’ve seen a surge” in heroin use, Dunkel said.

“Where one time it might have been marijuana, prescription drugs seem to be — young people coming in, that’s how they seem to start, they get into someone’s medicine cabinet,” Dunkel said. “It’s a huge shift. Usually, (prescription pills are) now a gateway drug.”

From pills to heroin

Fogle said she never thought she would use heroin, let alone shoot it up.

At first, she didn’t.

When she was 16, she started using prescription pills.

“I knew what I was doing was wrong, but at first it was just recreational,” she said. “I never thought I would let myself get to that point.”

Heroin is cheaper than pills, she said. Many people turn to heroin when they need a fix.

“It would take the sickness away,” she said. By age 19, Fogle was doing heroin daily.

She said the years from when she started taking pills until she started shooting heroin went by so fast.

“I knew about drugs and how bad they were,” she said, “but when you’re young, you don’t think it can become a problem.”

The heroin on the street today isn’t the same drug Dunkel was addicted to, he said.

“It’s become a drug of the suburbs, big time,” he said. “The lure of heroin now, once they know it’s cheaper (than prescription drugs), is now you can smoke it. The cartel has purified it and taken away the stigma of smoking it.”

But, Dunkel said, eventually some heroin users still end up using intravenously because of the high that results.

Lesson learned from housemate’s overdose?

Awareness is necessary to get clean and to stay clean, Dunkel said.

“You have to be aware of yourself and your thinking,” he said. “It’s almost like two people inside, the me trying to get clean and the me that’s addicted.”

Keeping up with an addiction is a “full-time job,” he said. The addict is fully immersed in feeding their addiction. Recovery must also be a full-time job, he said.

Fogle said being surrounded by others who know what it’s like to struggle with addiction, is helpful.

“This house does help,” she said. “It gives you the structure you need.”

Another thing that is keeping her sober, she said, is knowing she’s lucky to not have contracted Hepatitis C, or worse, while shooting up.

Fogle said she doesn’t know how to stop young people from becoming addicted to heroin, because, like her, so many who will use it one day don’t know that’s the path they’re on.

“For the younger generation, it’s almost like no matter how much knowledge you have, the curiosity overrides,” she said. “It becomes a problem before you even realize it.”

Once someone is addicted, you can’t scare them into sobriety, Dunkel said.

After Mackie died in the recovery house on Linden Avenue in York — which could be mistaken for a fraternity house if not for the Alcoholics Anonymous book on the coffee table, the Sees The Day mission statement on the wall, and other small clues — Dunkel took some of the housemates to his funeral in Pottstown.

“You would think seeing somebody dead would cause them to refrain” from using, Dunkel said, shaking his head.